June 17, 1999 | Read Time: 1 minute
How to Get Million Dollar Gifts and Have Donors Thank You
By Robert F. Hartsook
Mr. Hartsook, a veteran fund raiser in Wichita, Kan., offers 101 tips for development officers hoping to snare a gift in at least the seven figures.
“Your gift is probably going to come from a prospect who isn’t on everyone else’s prospect list,” the author maintains, and his strategies are geared to finding and courting such low-profile potential donors.
Each of the 101 tips is parsed into a fund-raising principle, a real-life anecdote illustrating the principle, and the lesson learned. For example, Strategy No. 19, “The Hand That Rocks the Checkbook,” reports that 87 per cent of all wealth is controlled at some point by women, and urges fund raisers not to spend all their time chasing male donors. The accompanying anecdote tells of a woman whom no one knew had inherited a great sum of money. She gave a multimillion-dollar gift to a charity because her son had received the benefit of its services — and because she was asked.
Mr. Hartsook’s 100 other tips include “Never Tell a Donor What to Give” and “Don’t Play Golf.” He also details six organizational success stories, including the experience of Inter-Faith Ministries in Wichita, which stopped its policy of “crisis” fund raising and taught itself to look for gifts every day.
Publisher: ASR Philanthropic Publishing, P.O. Box 782648, Wichita, Kan. 67278; (316) 733-7470; fax (316) 733-7103; 281 pages; $39.95; I.S.B.N. 0-9663673-1-6.
